Bill Fleckenstein: The Bulls will be punished before the year's out (King World News)

Link to interview with Bill Fleckensten

(click play when site boots...telephone interview)

Interview Recap via Business Insider
By Mamta Badkar
February 18, 2011

Bill Fleckenstein is still giving loud warnings about a QE-induced stock bubble.

He tells King World News investors are getting drunk at the punchbowl:

What's happened with money printing this time around is people have gotten a little financially drunk again.

Fleckenstein says the bubble is becoming obvious in tech stocks -- which surprises him given what we've been through:

We're working on you know internet badness 2.0 now, with social networking and all the other stuff, Facebook, Groupon and all this other stuff. There's a lot of speculation in tech stocks now and so there's a lot of things that you wouldn't think would be occurring now given what we've been through, and given the economic backdrop, but that's what money printing does.

Fleckenstein says the bulls will be "punished" before the year's out:

"Trying to guess how high is high and how long it can last is really impossible, and people that try to pick a top will probably lose a bunch of money."

Additional Insight from Bill Fleckenstein

Link to articles by Bill Fleckenstein in MSN Money. Video with Bill Fleckenstein and Dylan Ratigan

David Rosenberg: Household survey found that 124,000 full-time jobs were lost in October

David Rosenberg
As Posted on Business Insider
Business Insider
11/8/10

David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff is the latest to blast holes in Friday's supposedly "good" jobs report. Basically, he thinks the number was a total lie, and that the household survey, which showed continued deterioration, represented the truth.

It is astounding how market commentators leap on every piece of economic data; they merely look at the headline, and then make a judgment on whether it is weak or strong. The U.S. payroll report that came out last Friday was spurious, at best. Yes, yes, the +151,000 headline was nice and well above expectations, but it was also highly concentrated in just a few service sector industries, led by waste management. For an economy gone to waste, maybe that’s totally apropos."

But let’s get real here. The raw data showed that 919,000 payrolls were somehow created in October, which therefore would have made this the second strongest October in the last 11 years — in October 2009, the tally in the raw nonfarm payroll data was 646,000 even though the economy then was accelerating at a 5% annual rate. That 919,000 not seasonally adjusted surge in October far surpassed what we saw at the peak of the cycle in 2007 (740,000 jobs) as well as the boom periods of 2006 (698,000) and 2005 (727,000). The data bear no resemblance to the reality of an economy barely growing at all in real per capita terms.

For a bond or a stock trader, it all comes down to the headline nonfarm payroll number. For a labour market analyst, what is important is the information that comes from many parts of the Household survey. Who in their right mind could ever refer to the jobs report — it is an entire report, by the way — being strong when the employment-to-population ratio (the “employment rate”) dipped two-tenths of a percentage point to 58.3% in October. The labour force plunged 254k and the participation rate fell from 64.7% in September to 64.5% — the lowest level since November 1984! How is that bullish? If not for the slide in the labour force last month, the unemployment rate would have gone back up to 10%

The level of unemployment rose 76k in October and is up now in two of the past three months. They may take issue with Mr. Market’s and Mr. Media’s response to the headline payroll figure. The Household survey, when put on the comparable footing to the payroll report (the “population and payroll concept adjusted” series), showed a 505k slide in employment last month, the steepest decline of the year. That was certainly no +151k.

Not only that, but the Household survey found that 124,000 full-time jobs were lost in October, making it a five-month streak during which 1.1 million of these positions vanished, only replaced in part by 690k part-time workers.

To be sure, the payroll survey flagged upward revisions, an uptick in the workweek and a rebound in work-based pay. But the Household survey is consistent with an economy still mired in deep malaise if not contraction. So which survey is correct? Hard to say. Historically, only 5% of the time do the Household survey and Payroll survey diverge in any given month to this extent, and usually it is the former that has the story right. Time will tell.

Jim Grant interview with Henry Blodget

Jim Grant, one of the country's premier financial analysts and historians, has had a front row seat on Wall Street for more than three decades. Unlike most people who work on Wall Street, moreover, Jim actually works on Wall Street: His office is right across the Stock Exchange.

A former Barron's staff writer, Jim founded the beloved Grant's Interest Rate Observer close to 30 years ago. Even in an age of 24/7 online news, the publication remains one of the leading authorities on debt, bonds, Japan and the economy.

Jim has a stuffed bear in his office and a sinking-Titanic paperweight on his desk. We sat down with him recently for an exclusive interview to discuss an array of issues, including a possible bond bubble, the state of the union, and the economy.

Watch below the full half-an-hour interview. We'll be publishing highlights from it over the next few days.

This interview is part of our Inspiring Performers series, presented with limited commercial interruption.

CNBC Camera Operator prefers Blondes,,,to bad Maria Baritoromo

Great catch Courtney Comstock

of Business Insider!!

The CNBC cameramen got a little ADD watching Brian Moynihan talk to Maria Baritoromo... and zoomed in on a couple of blondes on the Bank of America trading floor instead.

Business Insider-David Rosenberg: Here's why you ignore the bond market at your peril

Business Insider: most informative comments from David Rosenberg. David remains one of the few straight shooting realists in the marketplace.

You want more talk about the bond rally? You got it.

Here's David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff on why equities and economists just don't get it, but that the bond market does.

The yield on the 10-year note hit its nearby peak on April 5, at 4.01%, and has since plunged nearly 120 basis points.

Declines of this magnitude very often presage the onset of bear markets and recessions. Typically, equities and then economists are late to the game. Nothing we are seeing is any different from the past, at least on this score.

What is key to note is that the bond market is the tail that wags the stock market’s dog — it leads.

The 10-year note yield peaked on May 2, 1990 at 9.09%. By December 12, 1990, the yield was all the way down to 7.91%. The S&P 500 peaked on July 16, 1990, the same month the recession started. So Mr. Bond led both by over two months — the 120 basis point slide in yields by December provided ratification (though there were still some, including Alan Greenspan at the time, who still believed a recession had been averted).

The yield on the 10-year T-note peaked at 6.79% on January 20, 2000 — the stock market peaked less than eight months later on September 1. By November 28, 2000, the yield had plunged to 5.59% — down 120 basis points (as is the case today), again providing ratification that we were not heading into some routine soft patch. Indeed, the recession started in March 2001, so the bond market again played the role of the real leading economic indicator, not the stock market.

Then in the most recent cycle, the 10-year T-note yield reached its high on June 12, 2007 at 5.26% — by November 21, it was all the way down to 4.00%. The S&P 500 peaked on October 9, 2007, three months after the peak in the bond yield. Yet again, a 120 basis point slide was the smoking gun for the economic downturn — it was called the ‘hard landing’ then, though the plethora of economists decided to look the other way; and today it is called the ‘double dip’ and once again this view is met with widespread ridicule from the economics intelligentsia.


Grandpa:
Today is yet manipulated and disconnected day in the equity market. 10 year at 2.82% while the DOW was up 60+ points on an anemic volume day. Based on the volume at 2:23 pm CDT, today could very well be one of the 5 lowest volume days of 2010. Flash Crash Deux is on the horizon.